I'm creating a trivia iPhone app. I've written 1,000 questions or so in the mac app Numbers. The problem I'm having is that when I export the document to a CSV then open it in mySQL lite and save it as a database for the app, things like apostrophes turn out strangely for example "there's" would turn out as thereás instead. Is there any easy way to correct this issue?
Thanks,
Chris
This is happening because you are generating the CSV file from a MS doc or excel file
where
if i write "There’s" in MS Doc(look the apstrophe character)
but if i write same text in a simple text file "There's" (look the changed apstrophe character)
That is why the text is displaying as thereás due to character encoding problem.
So you have to change the (’)character in to (') to display it correctly.
Related
PostgreSQL, DBvisualizer and Salesforce
I'm selecting records from a database table and exporting them to a csv file: comma-separated and UTF8 encoded. I send the file to a user who is uploading the data into Saleforce. I do not know Salesforce, so I'm totally ignorant on that side of this. She is reporting that some data in the file is showing up as gibberish (non UTF8) characters (see below).
It seems that some of our users are copy/pasting emails into a web form which then inserts them into our db. Dates from the email headers (I believe) are the text that are showing as gibberish.
11/17/2015 7:26:26 AM
becomes
‎11‎/‎16‎/‎2015‎ ‎07‎:‎26‎:‎26‎ ‎AM
The text in the db field looks normal. It's when it is exported to a csv file and then that file is viewed in a text-editor like Wordpad or Salesforce. Then she sees the odd characters.
This only happens with dates from the text that is copy/pasted into the form/db. I have no idea how, or if there is a way, remove these "unseen" characters.
It's the same three-characters each time: ‎ I did a regex_replace() on these to strip them out, but it doesn't work. I think since they are not seen in the db field, the regex does see them.
It seems like even though I cannot see these characters, they must be there in some form that is making them show in text-editors like Wordpad or the Salesforce client after being exported to csv.
I can probably do a mass search/find/replace in the text editor, but it would be nice to do this in the sql and avoid the extra step each time.
Hoping someone has seen this and knows an easy fix.
Thanks for any ideas or pointers that may help.
The sequence ‎ is a left-to-right mark, encoded in UTF-8 (as 0xE2 0x80 0x8E), but being read as if it were in Windows-1252.
A left-to-right mark is invisible, so the fact that you can't see it in the database suggests that it's encoded correctly, but without knowing precisely what path the data took after that, it's hard to guess exactly where it was misinterpreted.
In any case, you should be able to replace the character in your Postgres query by using its Unicode escape sequence: E'\u200E'
I'm making Excel documents in Python, using PyExcel for now.
My specific problem is that when people using Excel open one of these documents, it opens in a weird character encoding, when I want it to decode in UTF-8.
Is there a way using PyExcel that I can give Excel a hint of what decoding I want to use? And if not PyExcel, something in Python? I'd rather not have to write a note to the users telling them to change their settings.
I'm having trouble with a .csv export which is being uploaded to a website. There are must be some hidden or illegal characters in a description field I have in the database. I'm having a tough time getting the text to format correctly and not break a php script.
If I use the GetAs(css) function in a calculation, the text works fine. Obviously this won't work as a working file but it at least validates there's something in the formatting of the description field that's breaking the export. I did use the excel clean(text) calculation and that fixes the issue as well. Just need to find a way in Filemaker to do this.
Any suggestions?? Maybe a custom function that strips out bad characters?
You can filter invalid characters out of text using the filter function. If you only want a minimal set of ASCII characters, use it like
filter(mytable::myfield; "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789.!?")
HI,
[background]
We currently build files for many different companies. Our job as a company is basically to sit in between other companies and help with communication and data storage. We have begun to run in to encoding issues where we are receiving data encoded in one format but we need to send it out in another. All files were prevsiously built using the .net framework default of UTF-8. However we've discovered that certain companies cannot read utf-8 files. I assume because they have older systems that require something else. This becomes apparent when sending certain french charaters in particular.
I have a solution in place where we can build a specific file for a specific member using a specific encoding. (While I understand that this may not be enough, unfortunately this is as far as I can go at the moment due to other issues.)
[problem]
Anyways, I'm at the testing stage and I want to input utf-8 or other characters into management studio. Perform an update on some data and then verify that the file is built correctly from that data. I realize that this is not perfect. I've already tried programatically reading the file and verifying the encoding by reading preambles etc. So this is what I'm stuck with. According to this website http://www.biega.com/special-char.html ... I can input utf-8 characters by clicking ALT+&+#+"decimal representation of character" or ALT+"decimal representation of character" but when I use the data specified by the table I get completely different characters in management studio. I've even saved the file in a utf-8 format using management studio by clicking the arrow on the save button in the save dialog and specifying the encoding. So my question is how can I accurately specify a character that will end up being the character I'm trying to input and actually put it in the data that will then be put in a file.
Thanks,
Kevin
I eventually found the solution. The website doesn't specify that you need to type ALT+0+"decimal character representation". The zero was left out. I'd been searching for this for ages.
I have a function within a custom CRM web application (old VB.Net circa 2003) that takes a set of fields from a database and merges them with palceholders in a set of RTF based template documents. These generate merged letters and documentation. The code essentially loops through each line of the RTF template file and replaces any instances of the placeholder values with text from a database record. The issue I'm having is that users have pasted a certain type of apostrophe into the web app (and therefore into the database) that is not rendering correctly in the resulting RTF file. It is rendering like this - ’.
I need a way to spot this invalid apostrophe in the code and replace it with a valid one. Unfortunately when I paste the invalid apostrophe into the Visual Studio editor it gets converted into the correct one. So I need another way to express this invalid apostrophe's value. Unfortunately I do not know a great deal about unicode and other encodings so I'm calling out for help with this.
Any ideas?
If you really just want to figure out what the character is you might want to try and paste it into a text editor like ultraedit. It has a hex mode that you can flip to to see the actual underlying bytes.
In order to do the replace once you've figured out the character you'd do something like this in Vb,
text.Replace(ChrW(2001), "'")
Note that you might not be able to figure it out easily using the text editor because it might also get mangled by paste from the clipboard. You might want to either print some debug of the ascii values from code. You can use the AscW function to do that.
I can't help but think that it may actually simply be a case of specifying the correct encoding to use when you write out the stream though. Assuming you're using a StreamWriter you can specify it on the constructor. I'm guessing you actually want ASCII given your requirement.
oWriter = New System.IO.StreamWriter(path, False, System.Text.Encoding.ASCII)
It looks like you probably want to encode characters out of the 8 bit range (>255).
You can do that using \uNNNN according to the wikipedia article.